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BURLINGTON, Vt. — The Vermont Senate's approval of a “civil unions” bill for same-sex couples means “democracy itself” has been wounded, said Bishop Kenneth A. Angell of Burlington.

The Legislature is carrying out the request by the state's Supreme Court to give marriage benefits to homosexual sex partners who live together. Meanwhile, polls in the state indicate widespread public disapproval of the Legislature's action.

Bishop Angell said the civil unions bill, approved April 19 in the Senate by a 19-11 vote, “is just a steppingstone for same-sex marriage. It is a very sad day for the majority of Vermonters.”

The legislation would move Vermont well beyond the position of any other state in granting legal recognition, protection and benefits to homosexual couples.

It would entitle homosexual couples to some 300 rights and benefits available under state law to married couples. It would not affect their federal tax and Social Security status.

“Our last hopes now pass on to the House,” Bishop Angell told the Catholic News Service. He was referring to the fact that the minor differences between the Senate version and an earlier House-passed version still had to clear the House, which planned to take the matter up April 25. Gov. Howard Dean has said he would sign the bill into law as soon as it reached his desk.

David Coolidge, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Marriage Law Project, said he and other marriage activists have been “basically living in Vermont” since the state's Supreme Court ruled in December that it was unconstitutional to deny homosexual couples the legal benefits enjoyed by Vermonters.

Coolidge called the votes in Vermont “historic.”

“There is an enormous amount at stake here,” he warned. “Vermont is confronting America with a new claim — that you can have traditional marriage and civil unions at the same time and in the same way without harming marriage. No one has ever tried that and there is no reason to believe it will work,” said Coolidge, whose organization was established in 1994 to defend marriage's definition.

Beth Robinson, one of the three lawyers who argued in favor of “civil unions” before Vermont's Supreme Court, said the state Legislature has acted appropriately at all stages.

“I can't imagine many issues on which this Legislature has spent more time,” said Robinson, who also chairs an organization called Vermont's Freedom to Marry Task Force.

Perhaps, said Ruth Charlesworth, but Vermonters haven't had sufficient time to process the court's December decision. Charlesworth heads the grass-roots organization Take It to the People. She said the public needs several months to become educated on the bill and to talk with elected representatives about their concerns.

“The judges have created a brand new constitutional right without going through the process of a constitutional amendment — an arduous process meant to take time to achieve the consensus necessary to allow dramatic steps like civil unions to be initiated peacefully,” Charlesworth said.

In the days before the final vote, Take It to the People lobbied 12 state representatives they had identified as possible swing voters. The group wants to delay the bill's final passage until December. They hope to win support in the Legislature for an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as the union between one man and one woman.

On Super Tuesday, voters in all 50 of Vermont's towns that held straw polls registered their opposition to homosexual “marriage” at the ballot box by ratios ranging from 60-40 to 80-20. In 30 towns where domestic partnership proposals were on the ballot, 26 opposed the measures. A non-binding proposal for a constitutional amendment to preserve traditional marriage passed wherever it was on the ballot.

Tom McCormack is one Vermonter who opposes the bill. A lawyer and a father of seven, he said he was much more concerned about his children's generation than his own.

“The loss is for the future,” he lamented. “You can predict how it will affect the way students are taught in school. There will be no principled basis for treating heterosexual marriage any differently. It will affect how health classes are taught. And what happens at school dances?”

Robinson disputed the claim that most Vermonters oppose “civil unions” legislation.

“We know from neutral polls by various media that both sides of the debate are at about [the same] percentage,” she said. She added, however, that the focus should not be on polls: “I hesitate to focus much on that because … questions of fundamental constitutional rights aren't simply subject to majority rule.”

But McCormack said that the public has made its position clear even apart from the polls.

“There has been no issue like this that has consumed the public,” McCormack said. He told the Register that legislators have received phone calls, e-mails and letters expressing opposition to “civil unions” by a ratio of 10-to-1.

Critics of the bill say the legal recognition of marriage was intended to protect vulnerable parties like women and children. By widening the field to include homosexuals, they say vulnerable parties will only end up being marginalized again.

The Vermont Legislature — representing a state whose population of about 594,000 is smaller than that of El Paso, Texas — is “asking for the creation of a new institution which has not been recognized anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world,” McCormack said.

“The long-term concern is what will happen with our own rights and freedom. It will affect my kids because marriage is for children,” he added. “It is through marriage that values are transmitted and discipline inculcated. These values will suffer to the extent that the institution of marriage is devalued.”

Matt Daniels, executive director of Alliance for Marriage, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., said he fears the spread of legislation similar to Vermont's “civil unions” bill, which he called “court-driven” throughout the rest of the country.

“What is ultimately going to happen is that couples in Vermont are going to use these unions to export so-called same-sex marriage by suing in federal courts,” Daniels said. “This entire debate was started by the courts and it is going to end in the courts.”

More than 30 states have tried to prevent homosexual unions through the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman and allows states to not recognize unions established in other states.

Noting that the Vermont vote occurred during Holy Week, Bishop Angell said, “It is ironic that this holiest of weeks has been marked by the Senate's approval of a bill that mocks God's most basic plan for his children: marriage between a man and a woman.”